


Hydra Dominatus

by moreagaara



Series: Before the Imperium [7]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Adoption, Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Magic, Body Horror, Deviates From Canon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Escape, Exterminatus, Fanfiction, Fire, Fire Magic, Gen, Healing, Horus Heresy, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Literature, Mental Breakdown, Mental Disintegration, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Planet Destruction, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Separate Childhoods, Soul Magic, Space Battles, Space Pirates, Survival, Twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-12-01 22:36:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20921135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: Ghost sword is OP and isn't an actual canon weapon of Alpharius Omegon; his actual canon weapon is a spear that can be separated out into bits, which I have decided (although it doesn't appear either in this or in part three) is made of that rustless metal I came up with and as such has special properties in addition to the ones described in canon.  Most of them are anti-Warp creature properties.Yes, Omegon gets rescued.  I actually cut this off right before he did, so that'll be the first section of part three.  Also, yes, I did add in that Alpharius exterminatus'ed his own home planet through a very unlikely set of circumstances.Peep ownership brigade!WH40k and related:  Games WorkshopThe writing:  me





	1. Separated

_When the lid of their pod opened, the twins did not immediately leave. Instead, they looked up at the creature that had captured them in a mixture of fear and curiosity. The creature shifted rapidly between forms, growing multiple heads as fast as they sank back into its flesh, with faces appearing and disappearing even as the twins watched. The creature seemed pleased to have found two beings inside the pod, and plucked them both out with limbs that might have been tentacles, or wings, or scaled limbs, or the fins of fish._

_The twins looked at each other, and decided to wait and see what this creature wanted; neither of them had weapons, nor could they see anything beyond the creature that could have served them as such, and they knew enough to not reach for any weapon the creature made out of its flesh, no matter how long it remained there or how useful it might look. The creature regarded them for several long seconds, and eventually settled on a single form to speak._

_“And here I was worried I would need to choose,” it said to another of its faces, and the other face smiled back. “We only captured two pods, but we were lucky that one of them contained two beings, and so we can test all three of our hypotheses at once,” it replied. A third face chimed in: “These two we shall send back out into the universe, and the other—the one with the dragon shape—we shall keep here in our labyrinth, to see how long it lasts.”_

_One of the twins tried to slip out of the creature’s grasp, but swiftly discovered that the hand that held it was infinitely long, no matter what form it held at the moment. “Let’s see, let’s see…” the creature was saying to itself, and thousands of faces disagreed with each other as to where in the universe the twins ought to be sent. Eventually a decision was made; the twin who wasn’t trying to escape could go to a living planet, while the twin who was trying to escape would go to a dead one. No sooner had the creature spoken than its words were made so: the twins were whisked away on currents that followed the will of some being greater than the creature that had captured them, a being which occasionally allowed the twins to come close together, almost close enough to touch, but ripping them apart just before they could._

~~*~~

Reality wrenched itself into being; Alpharius fell screaming from the sky and onto a ground formed of glassy rocks. His skin was torn as he tried to climb out of the crevice he found himself in, and pain shot through his body as he discovered his broken limbs. In the end, he found a spot in the glass that wasn’t quite as painful as the others, and took stock of himself. Both his legs had broken in the crash, half the fingers on his left hand wouldn’t respond; most of the fingers on his right hand were nearly amputated from his attempts to climb, and there were shards of the rocks embedded all throughout his skin. He could only manage to gasp through the pain, and looked up at a pitiless sky that cared not for his existence.

_Help… _he thought at it, some faint memory in his mind telling him that someone would come. Someone had always come before, when he had begged for aid. But no one came now. Tears stung his face as the salty water slipped out of his eyes and found the rips in his cheeks, and another memory stirred. Desperate, he turned to it for shelter—

Alpharius and his brother were sitting with their mother next to a fireplace, and she was telling them a story. In the story, another of their brothers had climbed a mountain, and had fallen down; the mountain was too far away for anyone to hear his cries, and he had turned into himself. So long as his spirit remained within his body, his body would stay as it was—hurt, but alive—and yet his spirit was sheltered from the hurts by his mind. It was a trick she had meant to teach them when they were much older, but since their brother had found it by accident, she would teach them now. The trick could be done in silence, but the words she taught them would help ease the transition from body to mind and back again.

The memory ended, and Alpharius found himself back in his body. His pain was duller, but his hearts were beating more and more weakly. Alpharius drew a breath and whispered the words his mother had taught him; the world faded out of his awareness, and he fell inward…

~~*~~

Someone shook Omegon awake, and he opened his eyes slowly. He blinked at the person above them, fearing they would begin to shift and change as the creature that had thrown him here had done, but their shape remained stable. They were talking to him, in a language that didn’t make sense, and couldn’t understand him when he tried to respond. Even so, they understood him well enough to pick him up with care for his broken arms and cracked ribs. He still groaned when they placed him on a bed of some kind, and a being more metal than flesh began to examine him carefully.

The man who had found him and the metal-flesh being spoke in their strange language, one that danced just outside of Omegon’s attempts to understand it. He shivered when the metal being injected him with a pale blue substance, but welcomed the release from pain that it brought. He watched with interest as the being carefully wrapped his chest in flexible bands that remained firm as he experimentally twisted, and set his arm bones where they ought to be. Then he started to groan again as pain filtered into his body from some other source, pain that came from wounds he didn’t have.

He closed his eyes and focused, reaching for the source of that pain, and found his brother’s soul hiding within his mind. Alpharius could only manage to whisper to Omegon, but was able to explain that he was using a trick their mother had taught them. Omegon finished his sentence, now able to remember the trick in question, and remembered what their father had taught them the very next day: the trick of how to heal themselves even from that state.

It was much more difficult than the normal method of healing, though, and neither of them quite remembered how to heal, but Omegon wasn’t put off by that. He had, after all, just remembered both their mother and father…Alpharius needed to know how to heal cuts, torn muscles, and broken bones, so Omegon needed to give himself cuts.

He thrashed against the metal man with his feet, kicking against the scalpel it was moving towards his chest. He understood nothing of what it was saying, but did his best to aim his kicks so that his legs would be cut on the scalpel, on occasion deeply. The metal man, for its part, pressed a button that glowed purple on its chest and stepped away from Omegon, out of range of his kicking. That was fine; he’d given himself enough slices that he could practice healing and tell Alpharius.

The first cut he worked on was centered in his calf, and scored deeply through the muscle. He had to twist around to see what he was doing, but managed to fix the cut by imagining stitches pulling the sides of the wound together. Alpharius nodded, and began to fix his half-amputated fingers that way, while Omegon worked on his other injuries; in one of them, a piece of the scalpel he’d been kicking had sheared itself off and embedded itself deeply in the bone. Omegon took a deep breath and imagined fingers pulling the shard out of the bone, then pulling it out of his flesh, and was rewarded with a tiny clink when the shard hit the paper-covered, somehow warm metal he was lying on. Alpharius repeated the trick with the rock shards embedded in his body, while Omegon now turned his attention to his broken bones, completely ignoring the woman who entered his room.

Since his arms were already set properly, he worked on his ribs first; it took effort to support them where they had fully broken instead of merely cracking, and he nearly collapsed when the bone began to heal. It took him several attempts to get it right, and Alpharius several more to repeat what he was doing on his own body, but eventually, both Omegon and his brother were fully healed.

Omegon lay back in exhaustion as Alpharius faded from his awareness; they both still knew where the other was, but neither could muster the effort to do more than send the occasional wordless greeting towards each other, a reassurance that they were still present. The woman who had entered his room was performing her own examination, and removed the splints the metal being had placed on him to find fully healed bone that looked as though it had never been broken in the first place.

Her eyes widened in surprise when she felt two hearts beating firmly in his chest; first, she turned to the metal being, and said something in their strange language to it, and received an answer. Then she seemed to consider to herself, looking between the metal being and Omegon, then eventually nodding, and lifting Omegon to his feet; he wavered unsteadily for a few moments, eventually leaning against her in exhaustion. He blacked out as she lifted him into her arms and carried him out of the building.

~~*~~

Alpharius gasped in pain as he eased himself back into his briefly abandoned body. Something white flickered in the corner of his eyes, but was gone when he tried to see it dead on. He stared for a while, then decided that whatever it was wasn’t important. What was important was getting out of this crevice, now that he could properly move.

The rocks continued breaking off in his flesh the moment he put too much weight on him, but at least now, he knew how to heal his wounds well enough to keep going. There was a trick to climbing; he had to move quickly, and keep his weight rolling between two more or less solid spires of rock, until he reached the flat place somewhere above him.

He threw himself on the ground and healed himself first. Bare earth crusted his skin now, and held the blood he’d shed in the process of his healing; he lay down for a while, imagining that his brother was next to him, and that they could work through Alpharius’s nightmare together. For a brief moment, there was warmth, as if of another body against his own, but the warmth faded when Alpharius opened his eyes.

Something was watching him. Something that stood right behind him, but nothing was there when Alpharius rolled to his feet and spun around. Cold breath on the back of his neck made the hairs there stand on end; this time, he held still, though his body screamed for him to run. Some instinct, some memory, told him he had to hold still and save his energy. A freezing hand grasped his shoulder; a second hand reached into his body and twisted his guts, and yet Alpharius remained still. Something took a rattling breath next to his ear, and now Alpharius turned to face it, with the eyes of his body closed and the eyes of his spirit wide open.

The ghost—black and red and hungry—screeched and quailed away from the force of his gaze, and tried to hide its own lidless eyes with its hands. Alpharius felt his spirit respond half a second before his body did, and turned to face the ghost fully. It shrieked terror, screaming apologies in a language the universe had forgotten long ago, but unable to move while Alpharius looked at it.

He could command the ghost, Alpharius realized, and his stomach rumbled. “Show me where I can find food and water,” he ordered, and followed as the ghost led him to a forest with a dirty river running through it. Some of the trees had fruit, and Alpharius let the ghost go when he plucked one of the fruits and gently bit into its skin. He could taste the lack of poison in the fruit, and knew that it could sustain him, even if it wouldn’t be very nutritious.

The fruit crunched as he took a proper bite and chewed; it was mostly flavorless, rather like someone had decided to make water crunchy with the occasional hint of sand. He still devoured the entire fruit, lack of taste or no; he couldn’t afford to be picky, and he could always enjoy better tastes through Omegon, once his brother was awake. His last bite accidentally opened the pod at the center of the fruit, and seeds rattled out into his hand.

It didn’t take Alpharius long to plant them in three piles near the muddy river; he wasn’t sure how long it would take the trees to grow, but it was better to plant them and find out the slow way. After he was done, he dusted his hands off and followed the river against its flow, to see if there was any part of it that ran at least somewhat clearer. The sun had begun to rise when he found such a place, a small pool beneath rustless metal that glimmered in the red sunrise. Alpharius opted to stay put for the time being, in part because Omegon was awakening under his planet’s sunset.

~~*~~

Omegon woke slowly once again, this time in a soft bed with shimmering blankets covering him. He pushed them off as he rolled to his feet, and the room around him brightened into a soft red light as he began to move. There were screens mounted on the walls all around him, all of them displaying a language he couldn’t understand. For the moment, he decided to ignore them and move towards the door.

It was locked, and there was no keyhole that he could see. _All right… _he thought, and Alpharius’s thoughts echoed his own. He looked out through his brother’s eyes, and saw a quiet sunrise over a ruined city that must once have been magnificent; Alpharius, similarly, looked out through his own, and noticed that Omegon’s room didn’t feature anything that might give him food or water. He might be locked in, but whoever had done it meant for him to leave at some point.

Omegon nodded, and turned to the screens. Their surfaces changed at his tapping, and he swiftly figured out how to navigate them, despite being unable to read the language they insisted on displaying. Eventually he found his way to a screen that seemed as though it would allow him to change the language, only for none of the available options to be anywhere close to intelligible. He sighed, then started looking for patterns in the language presented before him.

It took him several minutes to parse out the overall structure of the language, but that was the best he could do. Understanding that much, however, allowed him to take a few rough stabs at opening the door, before Alpharius mentally tapped him and pointed to another screen to his left that had changed. This screen, as it happened, had a stylus attached to the side, and the screen gained black lines on its yellow background whenever either stylus or finger was tapped on it.

Interesting. _I think someone’s watching you, _his brother thought towards him, and Omegon looked around carefully, finding tiny blue lights crouched at the top of every screen, along with a larger camera tucked away in a corner, almost out of sight. He smiled wryly and waved at it before turning back to the screen.

_Whoever it is probably saw that I didn’t pick a language off that other screen, _Omegon replied, taking the time to clear the yellow screen of the experimental scribblings he’d left.

_Maybe they’re asking what language you do speak? _Alpharius suggested, then swore when a sharp piece of metal jabbed him in the hand.

_Maybe, _Omegon replied, then shrugged and wrote down his favorite part of his favorite story on the screen. Left to right, turning the wedges into messy part-triangles since the stylus he held had a rounded tip, and top to bottom. By the time he was finished, the screen held an account of the birth of the hero Gilgamesh, and Alpharius was grinning, remembering how the village storyteller had started telling the story out of order every time either one of them showed their faces in his house.

The screen did not respond for several seconds. Then something—someone—somewhere else in the house took control of it, and refused Omegon’s attempts to tap at the screen. Images flashed by too quickly for either Omegon or Alpharius to recognize, so they turned away from the screen to play with another. This time, Omegon found a sort of game he could control with the stylus, in which he was meant to get a ball on the screen through a hoop he controlled. It didn’t take him long to become very good at it, so his attention wandered to what his brother was doing.

~~*~~

Alpharius had climbed up the tallest remaining building in the ruins to get a proper view of the land surrounding him. From this vantage point, he could see there were distant mountains to the west across a sea choked with metallic waste; the same glimmering metal that resisted rust that had sheltered the clean water he’d recently drunk. To the south, following the river he’d wandered up, was the small forest with the fruit he’d been eating; to the east, the ruins stretched out into infinity, and to the north was wreckage of some ancient battle.

_I wonder who lived here, _Omegon thought at him as they looked. _What happened to them, if anyone survived that battle out there._

_I kind of doubt anyone lived through the battle, _Alpharius replied, carefully sitting on the sturdiest part of the ruin’s roof. _If they did, I’m pretty sure the ghosts got them, _he added. When his brother expressed confusion, he shared his memory of the one that had attacked him. _I think it wanted to feel again, so I do feel kind of bad for denying it, but on the other hand…it wouldn’t have let me back in, and might have gotten me killed in its excitement._

_I’m just glad it didn’t win, _Omegon answered, shuddering a little at the idea. _I don’t want to live in a universe without you._

_Me neither, _Alpharius answered, and turned away from the dark memory that threatened to take over his mind. Later, he would look at it later. _Where do you think mom and dad are?_

Omegon was quiet. _I…honestly hadn’t thought about them. Do you think they know that creature stole us? And if so, do you think they can find us?_

_I know mom can. She can find us anywhere, _Alpharius replied. Even Omegon knew that wasn’t the question either of them had to answer, and neither was whether she would come if she had the chance. The question was whether she could come, but the kinds of things that could stop her from coming were terrifying to both of them. Eventually, Alpharius sighed and climbed down the building, feeling his connection to his brother weaken as Omegon’s attention was attracted by the writing-screen.

The wind was beginning to pick up by the time he made it back to ground level, and was already blowing hard enough that the dirt around him was getting picked up and tossed about. Alpharius quickly looked around, and made for the sturdiest of the ruins around him: a small, round structure that seemed to have been torn off a larger building. There was a small gap at the base, just large enough for Alpharius to wiggle inside.

Once he was in, he was immediately struck by another ghost, this one twisted, hunched, and blackened so badly he couldn’t tell where it was going to move. Alpharius did his best to dodge its blows, with limited success; between the darkness under the structure he’d chosen, the howling wind outside, and the shape of the ghost blending in with the shadows, it struck him more times than he wanted to admit.

Eventually, he curled his body up in a corner of the structure, and whispered the words that would allow him to leave his body for a short period, then stepped free. A bright line shimmered between his spiritual form and his body, a cord that he instinctively knew must not be severed. He looked at the ghost again, and this time saw a small, alien child, screaming at him in her forgotten language. When she moved, the black, dripping monstrosity moved a second later, but now Alpharius could easily dodge.

And now that he knew what he was dealing with, he imagined that he held a brightly colored ball, and tossed it to the alien child. She caught it, and immediately stopped screaming to look at it. The dripping monstrosity started to fade, even as the wind started to shriek outside the structure. Uncertain, she tossed it back to him; when he caught it, he bounced it a few times, then rolled it back to her.

She calmed down, letting the monster she’d created fade entirely as they settled into their game. Eventually she started to ask him questions, and Alpharius remembered to make the little twist in his mind that let him understand any language spoken by the dead. Yes, he was alive. He didn’t know how he had come to be on this planet, but he had taken shelter here because of the storm outside. He was sorry to hear that it had been a big storm that killed her, that had pushed this structure off the building and onto her body as she’d been playing below. He hadn’t meant to disturb her, and was sorry for doing so. Yes, he would bring her a present for letting him stay here, after the storm was gone; would a fruit be all right? Reassured that it would, he slid back into his body.

~~*~~

Omegon’s door had opened, to let in an older man with a metal band dug into his skull. The man, at first, had mutely pointed at the part of the story he had written and tilted his head; Omegon took that to mean that the man couldn’t read it, and so he read it for him. When he was finished, the man was able to speak his language haltingly, enough to ask Omegon to continue the story. Omegon had smiled and complied, and the man’s ability to speak his language improved rapidly.

By the time he had reached the end of the first part of Gilgamesh’s story, the man was able to speak Omegon’s language almost as well as his own, so Omegon had asked to learn his language in return. The man had complied, and had been startled—if pleased—to learn that Omegon could learn the language half as well as he had learned Omegon’s. The name of the man’s language, Omegon learned, was Gothic; Omegon wasn’t sure what to call his own language, other than his own. He wasn’t sure how he knew it, and he wasn’t sure how he knew its writing, but he did know it, and that was the important part.

And so Omegon decided to speak Gothic instead, and asked where he was. The man told him then that their planet was likely the only remaining bastion of culture in this part of the galaxy; he was sure, however, that other similar bastions existed elsewhere, but no one had been able to speak with them (or they with anyone else) since before his grandfather had been born. The man hoped, however, that one day their people would get their act together and build a ship to go out, find these other bastions, and re-establish contact.

Naturally, Omegon had to wonder why they hadn’t done it already. The man sighed. “Politics,” he stated. “The people in charge right now don’t think that there is anyone else out there in the galaxy, and that people like me—who think there is someone out there—are foolish. I was hoping that you could help me convince them—”

Omegon was already shaking his head. “It’s better that we pretend I’m just a normal foundling from this planet,” he said. _At least until my real mom and dad turn up…which could take a while, _he mentally added. “It sounds like your leaders wouldn’t take kindly to proof that they’re wrong about something they care so much about…and the easiest way to deal with that problem would be to make me disappear. Then you’d have no evidence again.”

The man appeared not to have considered this, and was stunned by the idea. Slowly, he nodded, realizing that Omegon was right. “I…guess that means you’re my adopted son,” he said. “You can be Ronal, and since my last name is Kane, it’s yours too.” Omegon nodded, testing out the name Ronal to himself, and soon accepted it. After all, he could reveal everything once his real parents turned up. “There’s just…one small issue…” his adoptive father hesitated.

“What?” Omegon asked.

“It’s…well. You have two hearts,” his adoptive father blurted out, apparently expecting Omegon to recoil in shock, and was himself surprised when Omegon did nothing of the sort. To his credit, he attempted to recover. “And, um…that kind of makes you a mutant, and mutants…well, I’m either supposed to kill you, or to try and make you normal. The woman who brought you to me said I should do the second one.”

Omegon’s mind whirled now. So the metal man with the scalpel had likely been trying to remove his second heart, which was why he had had the tool in the first place. “Why don’t we say you put the heart in because my original heart was weak, and I’d die without the new one?” he asked; if he was already under suspicion of being a mutant on this planet, he’d need to be extra careful about displaying who he was.

“That…hmm,” his adoptive father thought carefully about that. “That…might just work, but I’ll need to call…” he trailed off, already swiping at the nearest screen. The woman he remembered from the room with the metal man arrived in moments.

“Dr. Kane, have you been able to fix our foundling’s…issue?” she inquired politely, while Omegon pretended ignorance of what she was saying.

“Ah, as it happens…it seems that the second heart isn’t a mutation, but a deliberate implantation,” Kane replied. “His original heart is actually badly underdeveloped, and would not be able to keep him alive on its own. It seems that someone—and considering where he was found, I have a very shrewd idea who—discovered this, and in the interests of keeping him alive, experimentally gave him a second heart.”

The woman thought about this. “Interesting. And rather convenient, if you intend to continue your feud with Dr. Albe,” she eventually said.

“Oh, this isn’t part of that,” Kane reassured her. “Honestly, I’m impressed that it worked out so well. Admittedly, that might have to do with the regenerative abilities he displayed…still, it is funny that he opted for a biologic heart rather than a mechanical one, and had it function alongside the original rather than replacing it entirely.”

“I suppose…” the woman said, eventually nodding to herself. “All right. Then he is not a mutant, and we face no serious threat at his hands. The issue now is simply finding him a suitable home. Would you be willing to officially adopt him, Kane? You do have wealth enough to support a child, after all.”

Kane smiled wryly. “I suppose I can adopt him. You lot have been after me to take a child in for years…now’s as good a time as any.” With that, the woman left them, and Omegon followed his adoptive father, Kane, to a small apartment attached to a university library. Omegon promptly slipped away from his father to start reading; it took him an hour or so to sort their alphabet out, but once he had it, the only thing that pulled him away from his learning with the library closing for the night.


	2. Captured

The one thing Alpharius actually appreciated about being separated from his brother—and all other people in the galaxy—was that his brother had access to knowledge that he could use. How to build a shelter, a fire, find food that wasn’t the crunchy-water fruits…frequently, Alpharius would find ancient, somehow still-working pieces of technology, and on taking them apart, Omegon could rebuild them for study on his planet.

Alpharius could then put the tech back together, and use it to carve out a moderately comfortable life for himself. He’d found a suitable protective structure that didn’t house a hostile ghost, and that was within easy walking distance of his various sources of food, and several sources of clean water. He’d found a tool that allowed him to carve the rustless metal—even Omegon had been unable to identify it—into shapes, and had used it to decorate his shelter, and to make noise-traps for the ghosts.

The ghosts could interact with the metal, and in fact couldn’t help but interact with it; either the chimes he’d made would ring as they walked past, or they would become fascinated with the sounds and play with them instead of continuing to hunt him. As far as living on a planet full of the dead went, Alpharius supposed the life he’d made was decent enough. The only issue was the crushing loneliness.

Admittedly it was a pretty big issue, and one he could solve to a limited degree by watching Omegon’s life and interactions with the people around him. He could pretend, for a few hours—any time Omegon was awake—that he was with his brother, and spending time with those people as well. Whenever Omegon was asleep, his brother could join him on his rock, and they could speak as though they weren’t thousands of lightyears apart.

It was Omegon who first floated the idea that perhaps Alpharius could build a ship of his own, and set out to find him, or their parents. _Or both, _Alpharius had wryly replied. _As long as we’re wishing for things to happen, since I don’t exactly know the first thing about flying a spaceship, let alone building one._

As a result, Omegon had started delving into the fine art of building a spaceship, and both he and Alpharius had promptly discovered just how complex it was. They would need to know a lot of information that only Alpharius could get, but with tools that only Omegon had. Alpharius was able to get a reasonable estimate of the planet’s size using the shadows of ruined towers a known distance apart, and measuring lengths by pacing (later converted into a more standard measurement system by Omegon properly measuring the lengths of his own paces). However, the mass of the planet was an issue; they were only able to guess at that, based on the average density of rocky planets in the size range that Alpharius had calculated.

It was then that they ran into the issue of fuel; Alpharius had been able to find many engines, and even some that still worked, but none of them had fuel. Alpharius was able to determine that the original fuel had been crystalline, somehow, but after weeks of research, Omegon had been unable to find any sort of crystal that could potentially work as fuel, even if Alpharius had been able to manufacture the tools to get them.

So they had given up, and Alpharius took to spending more and more time with his body in a trance-like state, as it fed and watered itself enough to maintain health and basic function, while his spirit spent more and more time with his brother on his planet, even to the point of occasionally taking over his body.

These incidents, however, did more to inform Alpharius than they did to frighten Omegon. After all, if Alpharius could simply take over his twin’s body like that, then the only thing stopping him from taking over someone else’s body was an appropriate connection. This in mind, he had pulled away from his brother for a time, and delved into his own memories; perhaps he could find something there.

~~*~~

Omegon was extremely worried about his brother, enough that it showed when he talked to people, enough that his adoptive father Kane became worried about Omegon’s mental health. Alpharius didn’t just withdraw like that, not from Omegon. He valued company too much, and there wasn’t any other place for him to get it, unless one counted the ghosts.

He spent so much time puzzling over what could have made his brother withdraw so suddenly that he almost missed the sudden appearance of strange men wrapped in hooded cloaks, with masks fully covering their faces. He stopped one of them to ask who they were, and why they were dressed so; and he didn’t trust the reply one bit. “We’re members of a religious order, and it demands that our faces and bodies be covered, save to the eyes of our gods.”

“Convenient,” was all he’d said in response, and had let the robed figure go for the moment. Afterwards, he’d mimicked his brother’s habit of staying up high, where he could see more of what was going on. High enough that he could mark each of the robed figures and track where they went; high enough that he could turn his binoculars to the sky and catch glimpses of a void in the sky just behind the moon where the stars should have been.

He gathered as much information on these people as he could for nearly a week; whoever they were, they were up to no good that he could see, and they had to have nefarious purposes. Enslavement, perhaps, or maybe just murder on a planetary scale…Omegon, for his part, hoped the latter. He’d thought he’d made an airtight case against the cultists, and had presented it to his adoptive father, but had been brushed off. The new people had, after all, been offering strange new technology that had done nothing but help those who used it thus far.

So Omegon had gotten some of their technology for himself; he had dressed himself as an ordinary citizen of the planet, even going so far as to disguise his somewhat distinct face under layers of paint and create a hat that looked like a mechanical implant, and approached one of the strangers to ask for aid in some invented problem. The stranger had been willing to help, entirely too willing in Omegon’s opinion, and had given him a tool they claimed would fix the problem he claimed to have.

In testing the thing, Omegon promptly discovered that it would do just that. In taking the thing apart, however, he discovered a signaling box deep within its mechanisms; when he’d built a small device to trip the signal, he’d discovered the tool’s true purpose, and had added that to his list of evidence.

This time, he went to the woman he’d since learned was one of the chief advisors to the planetary council and presented his case to her instead. She shared his suspicion of the strangers, and was willing to believe him, but insisted they approach the council carefully, since they—like his father—saw only the advantages of the technology they offered. She therefore set a date to meet with the entire council later in that week.

Meanwhile, Omegon quietly met with each council member personally. He acted amiable, reminded them of what he had accomplished in his admittedly brief life thus far, and didn’t breathe a word about the strangers or his suspicions about them. Only one of the council members—the oldest member, who still believed Omegon was some kind of mutant—saw through his veil of friendliness and demanded to know what he was up to.

So Omegon had told him. He suspected that these stranger-cultists were not entirely human—and he saw that the old man took that to mean ‘mutants’ with a pleased smile—and that they, as with all beings who weren’t entirely human, meant to destabilize the old man’s beautiful planet. Omegon might have ulterior motives of his own, but in this, he and the old man were aligned, and the old man agreed to think about what he had said.

When the day came, the old council member turned out to have done some spying of his own, once Omegon had illuminated the possibility, and had come to the same conclusions as Omegon. Whatever these strangers really were, they didn’t mean well. Unfortunately, the council was only beginning to determine what they ought to do about these strangers when anarchy rained from the sky and the strangers revealed themselves.

Even Omegon was horrified to see them: masses of maggots compiled together in a shape now humanoid, now slithering, now grotesquely spread flat against the ground, a shape that changed as easily as breathing. The first time he had seen something like this, he had been near frozen in terror, and had had no way to fight back.

He did now. “Ordinary weapons won’t work against something like that,” he said to the Council. “We’ll need fire,” he turned to the oldest member of the council, the only member who seemed to have taken this in stride.

The oldest member nodded. “Take whatever you need, Warleader,” he said. “I’ll put out the word that our forces—such as they are—are at your every command.” Omegon nodded, and sprinted to the tool shop where he had been spending so much of his time.

The makeshift engines he’d been attempting would do well as fuel tanks and flamethrowers; the largest could be mounted to a vehicle and aimed. He ordered everyone around him to do this, and acted as though he ought to be obeyed; lacking any other ideas, the students and faculty had done just that while he busied himself with contacting his adoptive father.

Omegon simply brushed off the apologies; those could wait until they were out of danger. He spoke in his own language then, and told his father to code a translator as encryption for all communication devices; in this way, he had safely contacted what few military officers remained. They had been the first to be attacked, and were down to a scant few men to operate the supplies they had, but their information was invaluable.

The maggot-creatures were after food, and needed only to touch a human—in armor or not—to consume them. Their weapons launched masses of maggots at their targets, and those masses could also consume their targets. They had no contact with their satellite defenses, and assumed those had been taken offline in the lead-up to this attack. Omegon thanked them, and distributed this information among those who followed him.

Several of his new ‘soldiers’ asked if there was any chance they would make it out of this alive. “There’s every chance,” he would say. “They caught us on our back foot, but we have them now,” he continued. Then he set them all up in ambush after ambush, keeping them in small teams of no more than five, each with multiple flamethrowers to make it seem like there were more people than there actually were. Everyone got dozens of shields, and were to throw those shields away the second they were struck by maggots; if they were hit themselves, they were to flee contact with the others.

They almost won.

~~*~~

Alpharius howled and fell to his knees; unseen maggots were devouring his flesh, and leaving no trace of a wound. _Omegon! _he shouted, and received only screaming in answer, screaming and visions of hellfire. He shouted again, and again, but this time his brother pushed him away.

_I’ll be fine, Alpharius. I promise, _he said just before their connection went dead, and for the first time since Alpharius had been born, the only person inside his head was himself. He screamed bitter loneliness, not caring how many ghosts he attracted. He wanted them to come. He wanted to rip their spirits apart, consuming the energies they held to feed himself and his own spirit. If he could eat enough of them, he could fling himself out into the darkness between the stars, and find his brother that way.

Yet the spirits began to flee from him, and he could not chase after them; when he looked down at himself, he saw that his body was bloated, swollen by energies that weren’t rightfully his, and now that he was no longer consuming more, he felt sick and dizzy. He couldn’t hold this much energy all at once, and he had to spend it before it ripped his body apart.

_Bodies don’t matter, though…only spirits do, _he remembered his realization. His fingers shook as he trailed them in the earth surrounding him, only sketching out the circle he’d been designing in his head for the past few weeks. The full circle shone brightly in his mind, and he murmured to himself as he sat in the sketch that merely hinted at its true power.

“So long as there is a body in the galaxy that can host the soul…” here his breath caught. “Of Alpharius Omegon,” there was a snapping sound deep within his mind as a closed and silent connection solidified. “Alpharius Omegon will live within that body,” he was saying, and the words sounded weirdly foreign to his ears, even as he spoke them as though he had known them all his life. He felt power roll down the connection to his brother, to Omegon, wherever he was right now, including him in the spell. The connection they shared made the distance immaterial, and he had the strength right now to reach up and pluck the sun out of the sky. “Alpharius Omegon has one being, and many faces. Death will make him take a new face, but he can choose another when he wishes,” he was saying as stolen power rolled through him, eager to be used and spent. The need to define an appropriate body pressed at him, and twinned heartbeats thundered in his breast. “The face he wears will always carry two hearts…and they must already hold his blood.”

The spell released him; he gasped with relief, and continued to gasp as the swelling throughout his body went down. He looked up, and his eyes narrowed; there was a tiny bird sitting just across from him, a colorful one he would have seen in seconds if it had ever been on this planet before. He didn’t trust it for a moment.

His hand moved in a blur, and the rock struck exactly where he had been aiming, and where the bird had been moments before; it scolded him from its new position, much higher than he could throw another rock. “Shoo!” he commanded. It did.

~~*~~

Omegon woke, or he thought he did. The last three times he had opened his eyes, it had been to some new nightmare his tormenters had created for him. There was a strange smell in the room, as though the air had been recently tainted with some gas, and that gas had been removed. He was being held with his back against a wall, his arms and legs spread, and the shackles that held him there oozed slime and tickled his wrists and ankles as bits and pieces of them moved.

He shuddered, let his eyes slip half closed. He couldn’t trust what he saw anymore, he already knew that much. They were still twitching and jerking in their sockets, and he winced when they occasionally moved independently of one another. He still saw—or did he?—one of the creatures that had eaten his people enter the room where he stood; it wore a cloak and hood still, though on its own ship it didn’t need to hide.

He gritted his teeth when something crawled into his ears. He heard hissing, scratching, clicking—language. He shook his head to try and be rid of the voice. _We wear the robes to calm you, _it was saying. _So you feel better. _As though he could feel better about his capture and imprisonment. _We didn’t capture you, we rescued you, _it was saying, and it lied. He knew it lied, and yet… _The Slaugth do not lie. We have no need to lie. Only humans do._

The monstrosity before him reached up to touch his face; worms and maggots crawled all over it, trailing fluids that could have digested him, but did not. Blind, he realized. The creature must be blind…the knowledge didn’t make him feel any less sick as they kept crawling all over his body, but never into him as they had during the battle. There had been a battle, and he had led the fight against them…hadn’t he?

He was covered in the fluid, and he had no choice but to inhale despite it; the air came thick, tainted, and the smell he’d noticed before was stronger. Colors were flashing in his eyes, and his tongue felt thick, but the voice in his ear remained constant. _We’re just helping you remember, _it said, and he couldn’t get away from it.

Mutant, they’d called him when he’d been born on the planet. First they’d tried to make him like them, but then he’d fought them, with weapons at first, and then with bare fists and feet when nothing else would do. So they’d locked him away, in some dark room where he couldn’t hurt them. He’d been lonely…he’d made a companion for himself. The alpha to his omega; they weren’t real, and had only ever existed inside his own head, but he’d been so convinced…

He was weeping when the vision-memory ended, and slumped in his shackles. Real, Alpharius was real…as real as any imaginary friend could be. The human brain was a funny, glitchy thing, and could convince itself that the unreal was truth. The voice inside his ear knew this, and it only wanted to help him…he was half their child after all, half theirs and half human. Something stirred in his mind, a contradiction stirred, but every breath he took made the memories dimmer. Or were they memories at all? Maybe they were part of the story he’d invented, trapped down there in the dark.

The other Slaugth was gone now. Maybe it had just left, maybe it had been gone for hours, or maybe it had never been there in the first place. The room around him was crawling with worms and maggots, and he couldn’t see where it had gone; there wasn’t a door by which it could have left. Then something twitched in his gut, and he understood. His stomach swelled out inch by inch, his human skin just barely holding the maggots back; they squirmed under his skin, pressing against it…out, they needed to get out, he needed to let them out—

His skin burst open, and for a moment, he was one of them, a maggot creature holding itself together with slime—

He inhaled sharply, and the air was clean. He stood on the roof of his adoptive father’s house, and there was a telescope next to him. Frantic, he grabbed his stomach, but nothing abnormal stirred. Nothing abnormal was happening around him at all. The door to the roof opened behind him, and he spun around; his adoptive father stepped out, and was wearing the robes of the strangers. When he looked down, he saw he was wearing the same robes. Then he saw something stir under the skin of his father’s cheek.

He couldn’t restrain himself. Something held his wrist back, but he ripped it free and swung at his father’s face, obliterating it and releasing the worms that were holding up his skin. Everyone on his planet had been infected, everyone who wore the robes. That meant him too, but he could heal himself…he made his blood boil, and there was screaming inside his ears as the worms in his body died.

He started to scream too as the pain reached him, but it was a healing pain, and when it was gone, the worms would be gone with it, and he would be clean. Eventually the pain stopped, but he was bleeding from both his wrists and ankles. He could heal the wounds, but there were still worms all around him, and they might infect him again. Fire, fire would work, it was the only way to get them all.

He called his blood out of the wounds, let it cover his flesh, and imagined the snapping of his fingers to be the spark of a match. The blood caught, and every worm that came near him roasted in the flames, though he wept even as he tried to find a way out. Alpharius hadn’t been real, only an invention of his mind, and he missed his brother. It would be better for him not to call for him again; it was the only way his mind could heal.

~~*~~

Alpharius was meditating in the center of one of the ruins; he could feel his brother’s distress, but something kept blocking his attempts to reach and speak to him. He had tried many different ways to get through, but every time he had almost gotten it right, the block had surged up and cut him off. He sighed and tried to sink deeper into his trance; perhaps if he managed to precisely match his brother’s normal mental state…

One of his ears twitched, and he opened an eye. There was a thrumming in the sky, something that sounded very much like the engine of a ship pushing against a planet’s atmosphere. It was a sound he was very familiar with through his brother’s attempts to get him off the planet; had he succeeded somehow?

Alpharius stood and very carefully stretched; several ghosts that had been watching him immediately fled before he could get a proper look at them. He let them go, preferring to listen for the thrumming. It approached, closer and closer, and came lower and lower in the sky. Alpharius hid behind a ruined wall and watched as the ship descended, then perched on the flat area of ground between the largest ruins. A ramp extended from the ship, and doors hissed open; people walked down it, and began to explore.

He didn’t mind that much, and trailed after one of the people who’d come out, staying high and matching the man’s footsteps. The man started to suspect he was being followed, but Alpharius froze when he did, able to read when he was going to stop half a second before the man actually did. The man eventually seemed to pass his feeling off as nerves and wandered towards the structure Alpharius had once hidden under, the structure that had killed the alien girl-child.

Alpharius extended a spirit hand and drew a blade that flickered with ghostly fire; when he pulled the hand back, the blade came with him, and turned real in his body’s hand. He dropped from his perch as the man knelt to inspect the crack that led to the child’s ghost, and then froze when Alpharius laid the unearthly cold blade against his neck. His hands went up when Alpharius spoke. “Stand up. Slowly.”

The harsh sound of his own voice bothered Alpharius for a moment, but he dismissed the feeling, as he had more important things to be concerned about. “Turn around,” he ordered the man, and when he did, Alpharius saw someone hardened by much travel, with more than the usual assortment of weaponry, who was even now waiting for an opportunity to use some of it against him. Alpharius’s eyes narrowed, and he kept his ghostly blade aimed carefully at the man’s neck. “Who are you?” he asked.

“First mate of the _Wayfinder_,” the man answered, and Alpharius didn’t miss the lack of a given name. “Who the hell are you?”

Well, if the first mate wasn’t going to be polite enough to share his name… “Solo,” he answered, and pretended to lower his guard by dropping the sword so that it pointed at the ground instead of the first mate’s neck. The first mate lowered his hands to his waist in turn, and they hovered near two of his guns. “Why are you here?” Alpharius answered, his eyes on the first mate’s, though he kept a careful watch on his chest and the first hints of movement that would happen there.

“The fuck do you think I’m here for?” the first mate answered, and when Alpharius was silent, he sighed. “Looking for stuff we can sell off, why?” His eyes flicked away from Alpharius to something behind him.

Alpharius listened and heard the footsteps of someone trying and mostly succeeding to be silent. His spirit turned to look, even as his body stayed facing the first mate; the person sneaking up on him was dressed quite a bit better than the first mate, and had even more weapons. Likely the captain of their _Wayfinder_. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to take on another crew member,” Alpharius eventually said, and there was a quiet snort from the captain even as the first mate nearly doubled over in laughter.

It was in that moment that Alpharius made his decision. He needed off this planet, and their ship was the only way he had of leaving, short of testing out his spell; if these people weren’t going to take him willingly, then he would simply have to force the issue. He disemboweled the first mate, then flung his sword behind him, impaling the captain’s lung, and drawing the ghosts out of hiding. _They must be desperate if they’re willing to get this close… _Alpharius thought, and reached out his hand for the first mate.

His mind resisted Alpharius’s intrusion, but as he was in the process of dying, there wasn’t much he could do to stop the invasion; Alpharius simply ripped the first mate’s knowledge of how to pilot the ship from his mind, and then pushed him over before turning to the captain. She was barking orders into some sort of communication device, having apparently tried and failed to pull the sword out of her chest; it would not become real enough for her to grab it, though it cut her with every breath. Alpharius let her continue ordering her fellows long enough to be certain that they would come for her, before he repeated his trick on her. This time he took more than just her knowledge of how the ship actually worked.

She knew how to navigate the trackless paths of something she dubbed ‘the Warp’, at least for short distances, and Alpharius saw in her memories that entering and leaving the Warp shaved years off otherwise horrifically long journeys. He took those memories from her and stored them in his own, then moved on to other memories: her vendors, her suppliers, her safe havens, the people she feared…her eyes were solid white by the time Alpharius was finished with her, and when he pushed her over to retrieve his sword and deal with her crew members, the ghosts set upon her immediately.

The rest of the crew—there were only five others—didn’t stand a chance against him. It was all too easy for Alpharius to predict their movements and counter them, even frighten them by coming from quarters they had deemed impossible. Each had some knowledge Alpharius found useful, and none could resist the ghosts by the time Alpharius was done with them. The last had some very interesting knowledge of one of the ship’s weapons, a weapon not even the captain knew about.

Alpharius strode up the ship’s ramp, and got it ready to leave. When he had finally left the atmosphere of the planet, he turned the ship around to regard the place, and circled it a few times, using the ship’s scanners to see if there was anything worth saving. Once he determined there wasn’t, he used the weapons the final crewmember had kept so secret against the planet. A massive bomb dropped out of the ship, and the sudden loss of mass made the ship surge upwards for a moment before Alpharius corrected its movement. He watched as the bomb hit the atmosphere, fell downward, struck the planet’s surface, and tunneled inward.

The bomb melted a path all the way down through the planet’s crust, and a caldera briefly formed in the seconds it took for the bomb to finish tunneling into the planet’s core. Once there, it detonated, and there was a ripple throughout the planet’s surface. At first, nothing seemed to happen, but then fragments of the planet began to peel outward from some inner pressure. Magma flowed and surged through the newly formed cracks, some of it shooting out past Alpharius’s stolen ship, to cool and harden into rock in the chill of space. Natural forces tried to correct the planet’s explosion, and pieces of the crust that had not torn completely free fell inward, where they melted, and further destabilized the planet. In the end, only an asteroid field was left of the ghostly place where Alpharius had grown up.

_Rest in peace, _he thought to what ghosts remained. Then he turned the ship around to head for the nearest of the former captain’s vendors; perhaps they’d have a request he could fulfill.

~~*~~

Screaming didn’t help, but Omegon screamed anyway. Too often, his own voice was the only human sound he heard on this ship full of shuffling, clicking, insectoid noises, and he had much to scream about. They were letting him wander the ship as he willed now, secure in the knowledge that he had nowhere to go, and that they could easily control everything he saw, heard, and felt.

Sometimes he saw them as humans, like himself. He was calmest then; even though he knew the shape was a lie, seeing other humans calmed him. Even though they spoke with scratching, rasping noises like the maggots they truly were. Granted, calm was a relative term, since he would frequently attack them, trying to rip them apart, partly trying to confirm they were human by seeing the meat they were supposed to have inside. They never had it; it was only ever masses of worms, of maggots, and that was when he would scream again.

He would retreat to some quieter area of the ship, slicing deep rents into his body, and calling to the blood that flowed out—the only way he could confirm that _he _was still human, that he hadn’t been infected again—to burn over him and keep them at bay. It was the only way he could really feel clean, too, the only way he could escape his nightmares for too brief a time.

When the fire was burning, he could trust his body. He could curl up, close his eyes for a moment, and rock. A steady, repetitive motion, one that he could use to keep their voices out of his head if he focused on it closely enough. It almost made them look normal, and he could almost trust the twisting, humping, slithering motions they made to move about the ship. At least then he knew he was seeing reality. Even if he wasn’t hearing it, or smelling it, or feeling it, because human hands would touch him whenever they reached out and crawled over his skin, and human voices would sound in his ears whenever they spoke, and human blood he would smell whenever he lashed out to scatter their maggots.

They always came back. The fire always died, and he would stop seeing what was really around him again. This time, he was in some sandy, dry place, with a river nearby. There were people moving around him, people with maggots crawling out of corpse-like faces. He couldn’t help the feeling of disgust, but something whispered that they might hurt him, if they ever discovered he wasn’t one of them. So he pretended, matched his movements to theirs, spoke their strange, rippling language, and started to whisper to them in secret. If they were busy attacking each other, they wouldn’t notice him. Tension built in this desert-place, and Omegon did his best to fuel it; it would explode soon enough, and then he could stop lying to himself about who he was…

Finally, the tension erupted, and the corpse-people fought each other anywhere they could find one another. Omegon fled the chaos, tried to find somewhere to hide, and eventually chose somewhere high, where he could see the rock behind the moon. He would be safe on that rock, if he could just get there…he signaled to it, desperately, then screamed despair when the maggot-men came for him.

At least he was back on the ship, though sand clung to his hands and feet. He brushed it off, brushed the illusion away, and the maggot-voices started again while he wandered the ship in a never-ending circle. The circle slowly shrank; he stopped wandering throughout the entire ship, started wandering through only half of it. Then only a single deck. Then just a hallway. Then he stayed still, in the middle of a small room.

The rocking wasn’t helping, but he did it anyway. It was the only motion he had to himself, since they’d even taken his voice. He heard himself, now, talking to him through the walls, and saying the same things the maggots said. They’d take the rocking soon; his body wasn’t really his own, was it? It was just something they were letting him borrow, for a time, since his actions weren’t worth a better, more powerful maggot-body. He could do better, he’d have to do better, in order to earn the maggot-body, or for them to give him the worms so he could talk to them without having to resort to such simple signaling methods as he’d used…

Had the sand-place been real? Of course it wasn’t, nothing was real. Only Omegon was real, only the thing that lived in the body he’d been given was real. That knowledge somehow soothed him; the knowledge that his body could die, but Omegon would live on comforted him. He steadily stopped rocking. The worms would wake him when they had need of him. He would wake up, do whatever they wanted him to do, and then he would be taken back to the rock and to his room, where he could rest and dream in between uses.

~~*~~

Space was silent. It was a lot like his old home, in that way, so Alpharius had decorated the interior of the ship with noise-traps made out of scrap metal, and hung them near vents that he could turn on from the cockpit, and thus trigger the noise trap. The ringing broke the silence enough that Alpharius could think.

There was the usual shudder as his ship dropped out of the Warp, and the silence was broken further by a loud and angry voice demanding his surrender. Alpharius smiled to himself, and decided to do the one thing the voice wasn’t expecting. “All right, I’ll surrender,” he told it calmly. “Why don’t you come over to my ship and we’ll talk about what that all means?”

The voice couldn’t disagree, but they haggled for a while over who went onto whose ship, and how many people the voice could bring…Alpharius actually was comfortable with the voice’s bringing ten or so people, but pretended to only want it to bring five, and allowed himself to be talked up to seven. Then he waited and listened for the noise traps hung around the rear of the ships to ring, before moving to greet them.

This particular captain, as it turned out, was suspicious of his ability to move without ringing any of the traps, considering his size. Alpharius—being almost half again as tall as the humans he interacted with—tended to dress either to emphasize his height and strength, or to direct attention away from it. At the moment, he chose the second one, as he would have needed to dress that way to move freely about the planet he’d been meaning to land on. The planet that these pirates appeared to have claimed for their home base.

Not that Alpharius much cared who owned what, so long as he could still trade supplies as he willed. The captain, however, wanted a sizeable cut of his profits. After all, in her view, she was letting him live. Alpharius considered this, then spoke; his voice still harsh from disuse. “I have an alternative proposal. Why don’t you join me instead?”

The crew the captain had brought with her laughed a little, but the laughter died when the captain herself was silent. “Why would I want to do that?” she asked, almost politely, and Alpharius saw her casually shift her weight so that she could easily draw her weapon and start a fight if he displeased her.

“Because if you do, nothing about your daily activities will really change. Only one thing does, and that is that if I need your help with something…say a space hulk falls out of the Warp around some planet…you come and give that help. In the space hulk example, anything you and your crew take is yours, and anything I take is mine. Of course, the two of us can trade…but the reason I suggest this is that my ship is smaller and can go to more places than yours.”

“So you’re offering to act as a scout, without actually swearing to our crew,” the captain summarized, and started to consider what he was offering. The crew she’d brought with her stayed fearfully silent, not wanting to interrupt her. “You know what? Let’s give your idea a whirl,” she said, and named three of her crew to stay on board Alpharius’s ship. No reason was given; both she and Alpharius knew what she was up to.

Alpharius, for his part, decided not to press his luck with the captain, and went to scavenge on some other planet in a different, nearby system; this one, thankfully, had not acquired a pirate base since he had last been there, and was more than happy to let him take what he willed under the usual terms. Naturally he then had to explain what those terms were to his new crewmates: the scrappers on the planet would be sending people up to take what they willed from his cargo, which at the moment mostly contained a variety of metals, minerals, decommissioned weapons, and nonfunctional robots.

“Didn’t you say you had fuel for the Ender Ring station, though?” one of his crewmates asked with a suspicious look.

“Well yes, but it’s not in the cargo bay, and therefore not cargo,” Alpharius answered. The crewmembers instantly understood, and most decided to follow him down to take what they wanted too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ghost sword is OP and isn't an actual canon weapon of Alpharius Omegon; his actual canon weapon is a spear that can be separated out into bits, which I have decided (although it doesn't appear either in this or in part three) is made of that rustless metal I came up with and as such has special properties in addition to the ones described in canon. Most of them are anti-Warp creature properties.
> 
> Yes, Omegon gets rescued. I actually cut this off right before he did, so that'll be the first section of part three. Also, yes, I did add in that Alpharius exterminatus'ed his own home planet through a very unlikely set of circumstances.
> 
> Peep ownership brigade!  
WH40k and related: Games Workshop  
The writing: me


	3. Reunited

Omegon felt the rock-ship slowly ease to a halt. They would be behind a moon; they always stopped behind a moon. He opened his eyes, and saw that the ship looked entirely normal today: worms and maggots crawled through the walls, quietly informing each other of the ship’s status, the floors twitched with more worms under a fleshy covering, even the doors opened like the smooth muscles that operated them. His owners came for him, and they looked normal as well, had even gone so far as to eschew the robes they had initially worn around him.

He was quiet as they dressed him in some of these robes; the monsters he would be sent to kill abhorred nakedness, though that did not bother his owners in the slightest. He shivered a little at the sudden new feel of cloth on his skin, but still said nothing. They preferred it when he didn’t speak or make noise; his voice hurt their minds, somehow, and he supposed that it wasn’t the place of a weapon to speak to his owners.

They sent him down alone, as always, and at first, he hid in the shadows, so that he could get the measure of this newest set of horrors. There were differences among them, there always were, and he could use them to turn the horrors against each other. That way, they wouldn’t find him, and his masters could eat in peace while he was put away until the next time he was needed.

There were several types of monsters here, ranging in height and armor. Some of them, the tallest, were clad in golden armor, and had the most freedom to do as they pleased. The next tallest had multi-colored armor, armor that looked steely grey under the paint, and frequently took their orders from the gold-armored horrors. Then there was everyone else, and there were differences to be exploited among them as well, but they would have to wait. He had to take out the most dangerous monsters first, and that meant starting with the gold ones.

His body rippled as he shifted and grew, nearly matching their height, but still slightly shorter. It would be enough, he hoped, and he quietly moved towards where the gold ones were gathering; it seemed to be a drinking place of some sort, and the idea made Omegon shudder. He’d had to join some of the monsters in drinking at these places several times, and he never liked it. Memories that contradicted the reality of what his masters said kept stirring in his mind when he did, and it always slowed his mission down. Still, if that was where the gold ones were, then that was where he had to go.

Fortunately, they welcomed him as a friend, despite his being almost a head shorter than they were; they noticed his robes, and asked how his mission had gone. “Quite well,” Omegon said, faintly wondering what they meant by his mission having ended. He was on a mission now, and it wasn’t over until his masters came down to feed.

They didn’t seem to notice his confusion just yet, though. Instead, they sat him down, had him join their games—Omegon frequently lost until they started going easy on him—and eventually settled back to listen to some story one of them was telling, in a language that was oddly familiar to him, a language he didn’t remember hearing before, but which he understood anyway.

Omegon eased back from them, more comfortable in the shadows; one of the gold monsters eased away with him, and Omegon slowly relaxed when he saw that this particular horror was too. “So what names have you gotten, kid?” he asked, perfectly casual.

Suspicion fired deep in Omegon’s mind, but he answered with some of the names he’d taken before, on other planets his masters had sent him to. “A few others,” he shrugged.

“Haven’t picked a favorite yet, then?” the gold monster said. “Mine’s Constantine, or Constantin, if you have trouble with that last syllable.” Omegon nodded, and watched him carefully. There was a subtle tension in Constantine’s body, like a loosely coiled spring that could still snap at any moment. “So where’d your mission take you?” he asked, and leaned forward to sip from a glass dwarfed by his hand.

Omegon picked one of the planets his masters had devoured, still carefully watching Constantine. He still hadn’t done anything yet, but something told Omegon that could change in an instant… “Oh yeah? I’ve heard of them, nice place,” Constantine was saying. _Liar, he’s lying, _Omegon’s mind whispered, and he started to tense again. Constantine noticed, but pretended he didn’t. “What was your mission out there? Were you scouting, or something else?” he asked.

_He knows. _Omegon didn’t have any idea how Constantine knew, but he did know. Omegon had to leave, and fast, but first he had to get out of this conversation. “I…scouting, yes,” he managed. He managed to keep his own face more or less relaxed as Constantine leaned forward again to put the glass back on the table. His eyes jerked, as he thought he saw Constantine’s other arm move to get something…but when he looked closer, it was where he remembered it being. His eyes must be acting up again.

“You’re gonna have to forgive me, kid, my memory isn’t what it used to be…” Constantine reached up with one hand to rub the back of his head. “Were you assigned to the 12th or the 21st?” He was still relaxed, the spring hadn’t let loose yet, Omegon still had time. He opened his mouth to answer, but something cold pressed against his neck, and then numbness instantly flooded around his body. He couldn’t stop his body from falling limp against the table, then sliding nervelessly to the floor. He saw without seeing, as his eyes wouldn’t open, that Constantine carried him through the building to a back room. There, he was briskly dressed in someone else’s greyish armor, with a helmet to hide his face, and then openly carried along the streets to a golden metal ship. The home of golden monsters, it had to be that.

Constantine dropped him into a part of the ship where the doors were made of bars; there were more grey-armored, painted monsters there, and Omegon shuddered without his body moving to see them. “The Emperor’s going to have to take this one,” Constantine told them, and the painted monsters made strange noises, like they both were and weren’t looking forward to what was about to happen.

Omegon knew some of what was going to happen. His masters weren’t going to be happy with him; he’d been caught, and he hadn’t been caught in ages. He would have to spend the rest of the trip to wherever they next wanted to feed trapped in nightmares, whatever nightmares his masters wanted him to see. It was only proper punishment for failure. Thinking about the nightmares he would be seeing conjured up memories of old nightmares…he curled up, started to rock, started to cry.

He didn’t respond when Constantine returned, with another golden monster, this one wreathed in a brilliant, shining light. Like the sun on the world where his masters had first found him, the world where he’d been called mutant and locked away. Where he’d invented a twin for himself, so he wouldn’t be lonely. Even so, he could tell the new monster saw him sitting and rocking, though his body still lay nerveless on the strangely warm metal of the ship.

_“I hate having to do this…” _the new monster said, and Constantine seemed to understand exactly what he meant, even though Omegon didn’t. One of the monster’s hands touched his cheek, and he rocked harder as he felt the gentle intrusion of some outside force into his mind. There was cold anger in this force, and it only got stronger the longer it looked at his memories; Omegon feared the anger would be unleashed on him, but it never came. Instead, the force eased him back inside his body, and did something to make him stay for a while.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t keep rocking, with his body still a boneless heap. He let himself sleep, drift into a dream, and in the dream, he felt more than he saw the golden ship taking off, and horrors running to what Omegon suspected were battle stations. The ship smoothly glided, as graceful as his masters when they were themselves, and spun until it found the rock his masters lived in, in its hiding place behind the moon.

Then the golden ship slammed itself into the rock, and was unharmed.

~~*~~

Now that Alpharius had a crew, he could turn its flying over to them, and focus his own efforts on trying to use its scanners to find where his mother and father might be. He needed his parents more than he needed his brother; the connection between them had gone dead, and he could only feel that his brother was alive. Somewhere. His mother might be able to reawaken the connection, but his father should be easier to find…

He felt the ship underneath him slam into something solid, and looked out the door to see what it was. One of his crew members was coming to fetch him. “Eldar,” was all she said, and Alpharius grabbed his favorite mortal weapons, then pulled his ghost-sword out of the air and attached it to his back. His tiny, space-based confederation of pirates and traders had never gotten on well with the Eldar, but they weren’t actively at war. Yet.

They just came close to open war every single time an Eldar craftworld entered their space. Alpharius silently tapped out orders to scramble the ships he had in the area; every captain he contacted knew their role, and each took off from their planet, or moon, or fueling ring, one by one and each taking up positions in the Warp where they could easily ambush the slow-moving craftworld.

Meanwhile, Alpharius took up the communications on his flagship—not the one he’d originally stolen, that he’d traded to a scrapper for a brand new ship they’d somehow acquired—and identified himself as captain of the _Hydra_. He kept his tone polite when he spoke to the Eldar on board the ship, and ignored the growling of his crew at their use of the word ‘mon-keigh’ to refer to him and his men.

These particular Eldar certainly held themselves to be superior to the humans, and simply demanded to settle some of their people on one of the nicer planets under Alpharius’s control. Alpharius quietly sent out more orders; his ships redeployed nearer the requested planet in a perfect ambush for the craftworld, and Alpharius merely shrugged and told the Eldar that if they wanted to settle their people somewhere, he could hardly stop them. After all, their craftworld’s guns were better than any his ships could scavenge, and there were far more Eldar on the craftworld than there were throughout Alpharius’s confederation, let alone in this particular area.

Then he turned away, and pretended to leave; once in the Warp, the _Hydra _took up a defensive position just outside the system the Eldar intended to settle. The craftworld smoothly glided into the trap he had set, and could barely respond when Alpharius attacked. Every ship Alpharius commanded already had their orders, and silence rang over their communication channels, while the Eldar tried and failed to guess what they would do. Alpharius’s crew laughed at their panic, as they always did; one of the captains of a ship Alpharius had recently captured had described trying to fight Alpharius like trying to fight a single beast with dozens of heads, only the body couldn’t be seen.

By the time the Eldar were starting to fight back, Alpharius’s ships retreated into the Warp, save only for the _Hydra_. The _Hydra _flew over the craftworld and allowed Alpharius to teleport onto the craftworld, then slip all the way onto the bridge, where he cut a single spiritstone free of their infinity circuit; the Eldar were too shocked by his ability to affect the spiritstones, and by how easily his sword could affect the souls of their dead, to stop him.

Alpharius picked the stone up, and then made sure the Eldar saw him put it in his pocket. “Don’t call me mon-keigh,” he told them. Then the _Hydra _flew over the ship again, and he teleported back onto it. He would need to get rid of the stone quickly, and there was only one vendor who would take them. He knew the Eldar would still settle the planet they’d indicated; he didn’t mind that much. But now, he hoped, they would treat him and his confederation with more respect.

~~*~~

Omegon was screaming again. He couldn’t stop himself from screaming; there were monsters everywhere, and his masters had abandoned him. The golden monster, the one who led all the others, had done something to his mind that silenced their voices. He had burned, his blood had boiled, and he’d heard thousand of voices in his ears, his body, even his brain, screaming as death ripped through him.

And now he was alone again, and his mind was silent save for his own fevered ramblings. Over and over again he ran through the conversation he’d had with the monster that called itself Constantine, trying to find what it was he’d said, what it was he’d done, that had tipped the monster off that he wasn’t what he was saying. Over and over he kept expecting his masters to suddenly appear, for the room he was in to shift back to normalcy, for his punishment to begin, but it never happened.

He turned inward until the ship shuddered, bumping against a thick atmosphere, and found that his nightmares had started. The monsters that grabbed him looked steadily more monstrous, and he was relieved. His punishment had finally begun, and he would be released soon enough. Best if he stayed still, better to not move and allow himself to be manipulated, like the tool he was. His masters were there, somewhere behind the nightmares, and they would stop the nightmares when they were pleased with him again.

He was carried again in the grey-metal armor, and taken through some great cavernous opening. His masters—somewhere behind the shifting golden monsters, they were the ones moving him—carried him deep into their ship, deeper than he had ever managed to wander…surely the ship wasn’t this big? Or maybe he was just lost, confused, and getting turned around. Yes, that was what was going on. They were just taking him around and around the ship in a circle, and he’d lost track of where they were.

They stopped, put him in a much larger room than he usually rested in. For the time being, he could only manage to stay on his knees, vaguely rocking and hardly aware of what he was doing as the nightmares hounded him. Someone sat next to him, put an arm around his shoulders, a human arm. His masters didn’t comfort him like that…he was imagining this feeling. It wasn’t real, couldn’t be real.

There was a pressure against his mind again, and something slid into his thoughts. His masters must be expressing their displeasure of his actions by pressing so, instead of just being in his head and starting to talk at him. At least he had company now, and it wasn’t so quiet…he relaxed against the imaginary body next to him. The nightmares started to ease a little, and somewhere in the distance he thought he could smell something nice. Something that smelled like home, before the strangers had come…

He opened his eyes. The world was still abnormal, full of straight, clean, and unchanging lines. He breathed shallowly, and the air was drier than it should be, carried fewer scents, but there was more variety, somehow. No one was with him, but the room seemed to have been designed specifically for him: everything was where he would expect it to be, where it was comfortable for him to pick things up and hold them. He didn’t have to duck even a little to get through doors, could jump if he wanted and not come close to the ceiling.

He reached out to touch most of what he saw around him; all his senses confirmed that everything around him was real, but they had fooled him like this before. He was probably asleep, and this was a nightmare that had claimed his entire mind. It wasn’t bad right now, but it would get much worse very soon. He paced out the room three times before anything changed: the only door that stood closed, the only door he hadn’t been able to move, slid open—it retracted smoothly into the wall in a single direction, instead of all sides retracting from a central point as it should have done—and a monster entered.

He recognized its face: this was the monster that commanded all the others, the one that even the tall golden-armored others answered to. If he could destroy this one, surely his masters would be pleased with him again—yet he couldn’t make himself attack. The face stirred up echoes of familiarity in him; he knew them from somewhere, but the monster approached him and touched his shoulder before he could remember where.

The monster spoke, but its lips didn’t move. The words simply entered Omegon’s mind, the way his masters’ words did. Omegon swayed where he stood, and listened. His masters had apparently decided to disguise themselves as a monster for a while, until he managed to please them once again. _It’s tiring to make a nightmare that powerful, _his masters said through the monster. Did he mean a nightmare that consumed all his senses…? Agreement rippled through his skull, along with faint happiness. He’d done well, then. So if it was tiring to make a nightmare that consumed all his senses, that meant if he kept waking up to this…it was real. More agreement, stronger happiness.

Omegon sighed. If this was what his masters wanted him to think now, then he would think that. Anything to please them, since he’d failed so badly. Something prodded gently at his thoughts, and he let it in, let it wiggle through his memories—it was knocking the ones that contradicted what his masters had been telling him loose, and he flinched, but held still.

It made him look at one of them, just one. One that felt like he had formed it early…there were screens in his memory, and a room with screens mounted all over the walls. The lights had brightened when he moved, and someone had come in to talk to him after he had drawn on one of the screens. They had told him that he was technically a mutant, and Omegon…had suggested a way around the term, and then they had gone along with his suggested story. And through it all, he had been speaking with his brother, who had never physically been with him, only shared his thoughts and experiences.

But if this was real…then the dark room he’d been locked in hadn’t been real. One of the memories was false. In one of the memories, he’d called on Alpharius, and Alpharius had physically appeared with him; in the other, he had only heard Alpharius’s voice and seen through his eyes…there was only one way to find out.

~~*~~

_Alpharius…? _His brother’s mental voice was weaker than it should have been.

_There you are, Omegon, gods. Where the hells have you been? _Alpharius immediately thought back along their connection; for some reason, his brother wasn’t able to do much more than send thoughts to him, and hope they would reach him, so Alpharius strengthened the connection as much as he could. He allowed his emotions to color his thoughts: happy that his brother had decided to talk to him again, irritated that it had taken so long, and confusion about why his brother had shut him out at all.

Omegon didn’t respond at first. He reached out along the connection, and Alpharius took him into his own mind. He shared his memories of what had happened since his brother had cut him off—stealing the ship, destroying the planet that had been his prison, steadily forming the confederation he now ran—and let him see what was happening through Alpharius’s eyes.

A space hulk had fallen out of the Warp, and Alpharius had used his ship’s weaponry to cut it into three smaller pieces; each of his major scavenging partners had been given a piece, and very little had been lost as a result of the division. All had noticed the division, but each assumed that Alpharius had taken the remaining two-thirds. Omegon was trembling, and Alpharius turned his attention back to his brother’s spirit.

Omegon couldn’t speak to say what had happened, but Alpharius could tell that it had been serious. There was confusion in his brother’s most recent memories, a level of confusion that threw most of what he remembered into doubt. There was a third presence in Omegon’s mind as well, a presence that moved out of Alpharius’s way for now, as he looked to see what had happened to his brother.

Alpharius was furious when he pieced the reality of events together from what Omegon could remember. Whatever these worm-strangers were, Alpharius meant to track them down and kill every last one of them. _That’s what I said, _the third presence said in response to this. Alpharius then imagined sending the ships of his confederation out against the rock-ships these worm-creatures piloted, and destroying them utterly— _That’s what I did! _the third presence commented.

_And who exactly are you? _Alpharius inquired, his mental voice all politeness, even as he became more dominant in his brother’s mind. His body turned away from the bridge of his _Hydra _and returned to his quarters, where he wouldn’t be disturbed, and where his brother’s injured mind wouldn’t be stressed by Alpharius’s problems.

_Daenus, _the presence answered, and ancient memories flared in Alpharius’s mind, echoed by Omegon’s. They had had an older brother named Daenus, and many older brothers besides him. Names Alpharius could almost recall flickered past, ever so slightly too fast for him to clearly see them.

The question was, was this Daenus _his _Daenus, or merely someone who shared his name? Alpharius probed the third presence’s mind, didn’t bother to be gentle—the third presence winced, but allowed him in—and looked to see if they had matching memories. Once Alpharius was satisfied they did, and that this was the same Daenus from his childhood—before being thrown to the glassy planet full of ghosts—he backed out of his newfound brother’s mind much more gently, and let Omegon back into the conversation.

By this point, Omegon had chosen to stay silent and let the conversation move around him. Alpharius looked towards his brother’s spirit and sighed. _I don’t know how to help without actually being there._

_All things considered, you being here might actually hurt him, _Daenus replied. _The only way I was able to convince Omegon to try calling you was showing him a memory that completely opposed the false memory of his past he’d been convinced was real._

_Right, because they talked him into believing that I was just a figment of his imagination, _Alpharius continued the line of thought. _All right, so for now, I stay out here. After you help him get better, what then? What exactly do you have in mind?_

_Well, step one is actually ‘reunite the human-settled portion of the galaxy,’ _Daenus answered, and Alpharius couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer scale of his new brother’s ‘step one’ and wonder what the following steps were to require such a large first step. _It’s going to be a bit challenging, since I was kind of hoping you and your brothers would be here with me, and we could all set off in different directions, sort things out that way. You’re far from the only one to have been flung so far away from Terra…_

_‘A bit challenging’? Those aren’t the words I would have chosen, _Alpharius managed to sputter, still highly entertained.

_My point is, it would be made a lot easier if we could find each other, _Daenus replied, slightly miffed at Alpharius’s mirth. _Do you happen to know where you are?_

_In relation to you? No, _Alpharius replied. He thought the names of the systems his confederation plied their trade throughout towards Daenus, and felt his new brother make note of them, meaning to try and find them on his own maps later. _By the way…do you know where mom and dad are? _Alpharius couldn’t keep the wistfulness out of his voice.

There was a moment of silence from Daenus. _Mom and dad left somewhere, just after your tenth birthday. I don’t know where, but I remember mom saying that they were going to the place where the sidewalk ends, so I think they left this universe for some other one._

_Oh. _Alpharius was quiet after hearing that, and was more than happy to accept Omegon’s attempts at comfort as a result of his own emotions. _I, um. I’ll try to send some of my traders and scouts out to find your people._

_That should help, _Daenus answered, and both he and Alpharius backed away from each other, though they both maintained contact with Omegon.

~~*~~

It took an extremely long time for Omegon to stop seeing the humans around him as terrifying monsters, more time than he was willing to admit even to himself, and even after he had trained himself to see their shapes as normal, the idea that they were horrifying creatures of nightmare intent on hurting or even killing him tended to sneak up on him at inopportune moments. As a result, he taught himself to keep his emotions well-hidden, to the point that only the tiniest involuntary movements would betray him; in this case, a flicker in the muscles just under his eyes. The Custodians he trained with—that he pretended to be one of around anyone who wasn’t Daenus or the Custodians themselves—could usually spot when his ‘monster moments’ took him, and would see to it that he made it to a room away from the general public so that he could get his mind back under control.

What took even longer to cure was his mind conjuring up its own horrors when none were available, and after Omegon had firmly placed his slave-masters into the ‘monster’ category, shifting the world to seem like he was back on their ship. On these days, however, he simply didn’t leave the room Daenus had given him, and took refuge in Alpharius’s mind instead. There, he helped his brother solve whatever problems presented themselves to his confederacy, and even helped him evolve his tactics to something even harder for his enemies to predict. After a while, Omegon started to force the world to conform to the way he knew it was, under the surface of his mind’s conjurings, though his efforts showed as his eyes darted from imaginary monster to imaginary monster.

As a faux-Custodian, he accompanied his brother Daenus on most of the missions they flew to establish what Daenus called his Imperium, learning both how his brother preferred to command his military forces and how his brother dealt with the more civil aspects of running such a swiftly growing empire. In time, Omegon felt well enough to remain behind on some of the planets Daenus conquered to help them start to rebuild.

On one of these planets, however, he started to hear the hissing whispers in his mind that he had long ago associated with his slave-masters. At first, he dismissed them as another conjuring of his still-healing mind, but then he saw strangers wandering around the planet. They were dressed the same way they had on his original home, they offered the same things, and they even gave most of the same excuses. He had maintained his calm all the way back to the Custodians he worked with, and reported his fears to his superior-by-technicality, Constantine.

Constantine took him seriously, and relayed his report in a clipped summary to Daenus. The only thing his brother said was that he was ‘on his way’, whatever that meant; in the meantime, Constantine kept Omegon away from the strangers, and ordered that any of their gifts were to be screened by the Space Marine Legion they were working with for that planet—in this case, the Imperial Heralds—and returned only if the gifts were determined to be harmless. None of them were, and at first, the people of the planet started to unite against the Custodians and the Heralds to support the strangers, the tension threatening to explode into open battle.

But then the tension simply went away overnight. Omegon broke orders to take copies of the evidence they’d gathered against the strangers to the most vocal rebellious leaders, and showed them the truth of the strangers’ gifts. He then told them his own memories of fighting them, and how fire had been the only thing he’d found that truly destroyed them. The rebellion and the opinion of the people had swiftly turned against the strangers, and only Omegon’s own leadership—uniting them in a single plan to ambush as many of the strangers as possible in one highly flammable building—had stopped them from immediately rioting against the strangers.

Every establishment but their chosen building began to turn the strangers away, and the strangers herded there, with irritated chatter that they were not allowed to walk freely as they had been. During the night, when the rock-ship they hailed from was just visible behind the planet’s small moon, Omegon sprung his trap. The humans still in the building left, their things having been relocated in the preceding week, and as they left, they knocked over several lanterns and candles, setting the oil-soaked building ablaze.

The rebel groups, meanwhile, posted themselves at every conceivable exit, along with several exits only Omegon had thought of, and all were armed with flamethrowers. Every single group torched any worm-creature attempting to escape on the basis of even a flicker of motion at the exit they covered. Omegon smiled when he heard their screaming, then looked up in shock when something gold streaked across the sky and slammed into the rock-ship they had come from. A pict-screen in the Custodian helmet he wore flickered to life; he saw from Daenus’s point of view as his brother swept into the worm-creatures like an ichor-stained hurricane wielding fire and death.

The sword his brother carried sang with its usual fire, but the clawed gauntlet he wore on his other hand, the one that usually crackled with lightning, now hummed with its own, far hotter fire. And Daenus did not stop with just the walking worm-men; he tore the ship itself apart whenever he could, whenever he saw pulsing flesh or writhing maggots. Omegon—none of the Custodians—were familiar with the language Daenus was screaming epithets in, but whatever he said sounded extremely colorful.

Several times the worm-men tried to stop him by firing globs of themselves at his armor; several times they hit, but either they hit the chest armor—too thick for the worms to burrow through—or they actually managed to burrow through the weaker armor on his limbs. On these last occasions, Omegon got to witness the true terror his brother was capable of unleashing, for the second any maggot drew Daenus’s blood, his entire body was momentarily wreathed in flame, instantly destroying any of the creatures still clinging to him, and—worse for his enemies—allowing him to shoot jets of the blood-fueled flame from his fingertips as they retreated. Once, when Daenus found himself in what appeared to be an engine room, he bit his lip to draw blood so that he could breathe the fire at anything even vaguely organic around him.

The Custodians on the ship with him merely kept the worm-creatures from escaping with targeted blasts of lasers that disintegrated anything they touched. Omegon watched all of this in half-horrified, half-astonished silence, and jumped almost a foot when Constantine tapped his shoulder. “He did that to the ones who had you captured too,” Constantine told him over a private vox channel, and spoke the language Omegon understood best, a language Daenus named Sumerian. “Once he figured out what all they’d actually done to you, nothing short of his ship exploding would have stopped him from ripping them to pieces, and even then, he’d only have stopped long enough to find another ship to ram into theirs.”

Omegon found that to be extremely comforting, even if his brother’s methods of destruction bordered on the psychotic… Later, he told Alpharius everything that had happened, and shared his concerns as well. Alpharius had replied that even that ridiculous level of destruction had been warranted; the worm-things deserved everything both he and Daenus could throw at them, not just for being creatures of nightmare, but for everything they had done to hurt Omegon. Then he relayed his own actions, when the worm-creatures had turned up in his section of the galaxy, wherever that was.

Daenus had been restrained in comparison.

~~*~~

Several centuries passed before Alpharius’s scout ships finally found a hint of Daenus’s presence near enough to be detected. At least, Alpharius thought they were from his brother at first; the build of the ship certainly matched what he had seen through Omegon’s eyes. Then he got a better look at the ships’ colors, and he started to doubt. Daenus favored gold, and a two-headed eagle for his insignia, while this ship was painted black and white, and carried a symbol of a wolf’s head on a crescent moon.

Alpharius silently prodded Omegon, but found his brother to be asleep. All things considered, Omegon probably needed the rest, so Alpharius stopped pressing his twin and sighed. For a long while, he watched as the ship became multiple ships, each painted black and white with the wolf’s head insignia, and the ships powered through the void into the territory his confederacy called its own. No communications were raised, no signals flashed; they simply invaded as though the space were theirs.

So Alpharius gave the order to attack one of the larger outlying ships. His own ships were tiny, barely flies in comparison to the massive ship, but that made them more maneuverable. That meant they could strike from hundreds of directions, where the larger ship could only strike in a scant handful. He issued a few more orders, and his ships took up what he felt was a standard ambush position before they struck.

The first strike was one of Alpharius’s smaller ships dropping out of the Warp inside the larger ship’s void shields. Once there, it had just enough time to drive itself into the shield generator, and his other ships danced in and out of the Warp to strike the massive ship’s most sensitive areas again and again.

The ship was torn apart in mere minutes, at which point Alpharius’s ships immediately fled the field, setting up much further away, deeper in their territory. Alpharius smiled as he heard the enemy commander raging at the loss of his ship, and angrily ordering pursuit. The fleet didn’t make it much further into Alpharius’s territory before he ambushed another of their outer ships using an entirely different strategy.

Then he drew off most of the fleet’s scout ships by having his own flagship flicker into existence for just long enough, setting a course for one of his more heavily defended planets. While he was gone, his confederacy ambushed the fleet a third time, then a fourth, each time taking another ship. By the time Alpharius returned, with the scout ships that had followed him utterly destroyed, the enemy commander was even more angry than Alpharius could have imagined.

Each ambush only served to increase the enemy commander’s rage, and made him steadily more predictable. By the time Alpharius had led the fleet where he wanted them, it was barely a quarter as strong as it had been, and Alpharius decided it was time for the final blow. One final ambush, a last strike at the flagship and the enemy commander. He would need to sacrifice some pawns to get close…

He chose his worst pilots for the attack, and used an ambush formation he had already used. The fleet, now used to his methods, was able to sweep the attackers aside, but he had already sown enough confusion that there was an opening straight through the fleet and to the flagship. Alpharius piloted his ship alone, and blew a few minor components of his ship—not enough to actually affect his ability to fly, but enough that he looked like a wounded fighter coming back for repairs.

The flagship let him in, and he extended the ramp, but didn’t come down until the flagship’s engineers had begun to swarm his own ship to try and find whoever had flown it. They never saw him leave the ship, and they never saw him leave the repair bay, or enter the flagship’s maintenance ducts. At first, he got lost several times, but there were enough people wandering the ship alone that he could kidnap them and steal what memories they had about how the ship was designed that Alpharius was soon able to find his way around.

After that, it was a simple matter of getting to the bridge, removing the commander’s bodyguards, and then finally dealing with the commander himself. First he left the maintenance ducts and stole the memories of one the rank-and-file soldiers; a soldier, strangely enough, who was just a foot shy his own height. He then dragged them into a small, unwatched room, and summoned his ghost blade directly through their hearts.

With the soldier’s memories meshed in his own, Alpharius was swiftly able to remove the armor and dress himself in it; he’d just have to hope that no one noticed the pair of inch-long holes punching through the armor’s chest and back. Now he was properly dressed, he joined a flow of other soldiers heading towards the bridge; when that flow turned off his desired path, he joined another. Three times he was stopped by a higher officer, and three times he lured them into a deserted area and killed them before rejoining the flow of soldiers heading to the bridge.

Eventually he made it, and gained entrance by saying he had an important message for the Primarch, as the soldiers’ memories called the enemy commander. But once he was inside, and the door behind him sealed, he simply opened fire on the Primarch’s bodyguards. The first died before he could react, and the others had an unfortunate habit of shooting where Alpharius had been just a moment before. With every shot, Alpharius stepped closer, eventually coming too close for his guns to be of any further use, so he drew his ghostly blade and sliced the final two bodyguards to ribbons.

Alpharius’s borrowed helmet was smoking and emitting distressing noises, so he quickly removed it and tossed it aside; he had half a heartbeat’s warning to parry the enemy commander’s incoming claws, crackling with lightning. He saw a flash of the enemy commander’s face; it was similar to his own, and in his hesitation, he missed an opening he could have used to kill the commander.

The commander was already swinging again, and rather than stand his ground and match the slightly bigger man’s strength, Alpharius faded away from the strikes, dodging and sidestepping rather than actively parrying. Once he had the rhythm of the commander’s attacks down, he slid a portion of his awareness out of his body to look more closely at the commander.

Alpharius was perhaps half a foot shorter than the commander, in a galaxy where he tended to tower over everyone else; they both had coppery skin, and both had blue eyes—though the commander’s had a red tint that made them look purple, which Alpharius lacked. Otherwise, they were very nearly the same, and Alpharius saw the commander also noticed their similarities.

Eventually, the commander managed to rip Alpharius’s ghostly sword out of his hand—without Alpharius holding it, it vanished—and simply stood before his would-be assassin, breathing hard; Alpharius waited patiently, breathing slightly harder. He wasn’t used to protracted fights like this, and usually ended what battles he got in as quickly as possible. Eventually, the commander spoke: “Hello brother.” Alpharius nodded, keeping his embarrassment buried in the back of his mind. “What’s your name? And…where did you come from?” the commander asked, genuinely curious.

“I’m Alpharius. I’ve been travelling this area for a while now,” Alpharius answered. His newfound brother didn’t need to know the whole story, at least not just yet. Not until Alpharius knew just how well he could trust this new brother.

“Horus Lupercal. But what planet did you start from, if you were travelling?” the commander identified himself, then pressed Alpharius, who maintained his silence for several long minutes until his new brother sighed. “I don’t mean to be rude, just usually that’s where we usually start recruiting new Astartes for your Legion.” Alpharius only blinked at him, once, slowly. “…if you do want to be a Primarch, I mean,” Horus amended, slightly lamely, and unhappy to be so off balance.

Alpharius would have continued his silence, but around then, he felt Omegon wake up. “I’ll let you know,” he informed Horus. “And I’ll go ahead and stay on board. Show of faith and all that.” More a test to see whether Horus would change his mind about killing him for his assassination attempt, but the effect was much the same.

Horus nodded gratefully, and escorted Alpharius to a large suite of rooms with screens that looked on the void outside. The second he had gone, Alpharius slipped out of the rooms through the maintenance ducts and retrieved most of his noise traps; in the process, he alerted no one, and was back—and had hung all his noise traps where he wanted them—before anyone came to check on him. In the meantime, he told Omegon the full story, with an apology for not having woken him. Omegon didn’t mind.

~~*~~

_Horus went system by system through Alpharius’s confederation, preceded by orders from Alpharius that they were to surrender without too much hassle. On the rare occasion anyone questioned him, he briefly explained that he had met with the commander, and that said commander was well enough as outsiders went. For each planet they stopped at, Horus would usually pull Alpharius aside and ask him if that was the planet he had first landed on, and for each planet, Alpharius truthfully told him no._

_Frustrated as Horus became, Alpharius simply didn’t want the pity that would surely come as a result of his new brother’s knowing that Alpharius had been dropped on a world without life, that his only contact with the wider universe had been through his twin, and that he had only gotten off the hulk of lifeless rock by a lucky fluke. He particularly didn’t want Horus to know about his twin, feeling that secret would give him more opportunities to keep him off-balance._

_In the meantime, Alpharius spoke with Omegon, and through Omegon, he learned that of all the Primarchs, only they had realized that they were Daenus’s brothers, rather than his sons. Even Horus believed Daenus was his—and therefore Alpharius’s—father, and together Alpharius and Omegon silently agreed that it was better to let Daenus reveal the secret whenever he was ready. Both intended to encourage him to do so sooner rather than later, however._

_Once Horus had run out of planets to question Alpharius about, the two Primarchs had returned to Terra; Omegon informed Alpharius that Daenus would be throwing a short party in his honor, and had to reassure him over and over that it would be extremely short—as short as Daenus could conceivably make it without being rude. Daenus’s excuse would be that he had matters of state to deal with—and it was true, Omegon had noticed the Emperor’s workload become increasingly terrifying, and had needed to help him with it on several occasions._

_Alpharius busied himself during the trip to Terra with reviewing Omegon’s short list of recruiting grounds for their new Legion; in the end, they had settled on five preferred places, and ten less preferred ones, as they both wished to keep their Legion’s homeworld spread out, so no single strike could cripple them. Together, they decided that Alpharius would be the public face of the Legion, so that Omegon—whose brain still occasionally played cruel tricks on him—could keep to himself; for the most part, their Legion would do the same, and gather information on the other Legions and Primarchs they would be working with. Just on the off chance they might have to fight them later._

_More centuries passed, and their Alpha Legion pacified planet after planet with terrifying speed, employing strategies that made their brother Roboute frown at them, and their brothers Leman Russ and Angron call them weak, spineless cowards. Both Alpharius and Omegon simply shrugged at the name-calling; none of it bothered them, so long as they won the system, and they both knew that Daenus didn’t really care how they brought planets into the Imperium, so long as they were._

_What had bothered Omegon was his accidental discovery of Alpharius’s old spell, before Alpharius had had a chance to tell him about it. He and his squad had been discovered during a reconnaissance operation, and had gotten themselves slain to a man on their way to safety. A Legionnaire near Alpharius had fallen to his knees, screaming, with Omegon’s foreign spirit attempting to take up residence in his body; Alpharius had ended the marine’s suffering by severing his soul’s connection to his body, and Omegon’s soul connection had swiftly taken over. Omegon had been displeased that Alpharius had kept it a secret for so long, and Daenus—who had been travelling with them at the time—was displeased that Alpharius had done it at all. _

_Alpharius rolled his eyes at the idea that soul magic was evil—their mother had taught them these tricks, and their mother was not evil—but had looked down when Daenus had wondered aloud about how in the hells he was supposed to keep track of them, when they were able to switch bodies. But then Daenus had solved the issue, and drawn an ancient symbol on each of their foreheads; he called them Greek letters, and said that they stood for the first part of their names, and that the letters had been branded onto their souls. The letters would show up on their bodies—visible under a blacklight—within a few hours of takeover._

_Then Horus had fallen to Chaos, and the twins had encountered an Eldar-run group calling itself the Cabal, meeting a human calling himself John Grammaticus. John had told them that there were but two ways the galaxy would go now, and that the fate of the galaxy hinged upon their choice. Either Horus won, because the Alpha Legion joined him, and all humanity would perish in a century of unrivaled violence…or Horus lost, because the Alpha Legion joined the Emperor, and the Imperium would survive as a rotting carcass for millennia. Alpharius—with Omegon pretending to be a mere space marine in his retinue—informed the man he would think on his words._

_The second John had left, Omegon had turned to his brother. “Do you believe him?” he had asked, somewhat worried._

_“Do you?” Alpharius had retorted, and Omegon had thought for a moment._

_“…no. So what should we do?” Alpharius’ twin asked._

_“Play both sides. One of us can play traitor, and the other can play loyalist,” Alpharius replied, outlining a plan he’d been working on since they’d started gathering information on their brothers. “…the only question is, which of us goes to Daenus and which of us goes to Horus?”_

_Omegon had simply shrugged. “You’re the better tactician. You have the best chance of getting through Sol’s defenses. Besides, my twitches probably won’t be noticed among all the other fun cognitive neuroses Horus’s buddies are going to have.”_

_They were almost right. Alpharius nearly slipped through the outermost defenses and past Pluto. He hadn’t expected Rogal Dorn—tasked with the defense of Terra—to slingshot his entire fleet around the various planets to get to him so quickly. Nor had he expected Dorn to take Alpharius’s message in the Investiary so wrongly, or for Dorn to not be in the mood to talk once he finally got to Alpharius. “Dorn—” he had started, but never finished, as a chainsword had been driven into his skull._

_He snapped awake in a space marine near Omegon, who quickly signaled for Alpharius to be placed in his own chambers, while he went to reassure Horus. When he got back, Alpharius was wincing from the pain of the wounds he’d received in his fight against Dorn, but well enough to speak silently. The Heresy, it seemed, was going badly for Horus, and Omegon could tell even if the Warmaster couldn’t. Additionally, since Alpharius hadn’t managed to make it through to Daenus, they would be seen as a Traitor Legion until one of them made it to him to set the record straight, and since Dorn had managed to kill Alpharius’s body, Omegon would need to die too._

_Alpharius had nodded, and taken half of the Legion to spread it further than they ever had before. Omegon, meanwhile, would take his half of the Legion and dive into battle after battle until he finally managed to achieve a public death. It came, in the end, at the hands of Roboute Guilliman, and Omegon’s spirit promptly stole a space marine near his twin. The band of Legionnaires he’d been leading had followed their orders to not show any weakness at Omegon’s defeat. The Alpha Legion would remain a “threat” to the Imperium forever._

_At least until they had a chance to explain themselves._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is finished! And for a moment, they were all happy. This, however, is Warhammer 40k, and happiness only exists for like a minute tops.
> 
> Peep Ownership--  
WH40k and related: Games Workshop  
Teh Emprah's name and the writing: me

**Author's Note:**

> Ooookay. So the Alpha Legion then. A Legion about which basically nothing is known, other than that they exist (probably) and are traitors (maybe). We can confirm (mostly) that the Alpha Legion (if it exists) does in fact have twin Primarchs instead of just the one (or do they?).
> 
> ...I'm not kidding, that's how the lore reads. In fact, we have a whole four options for how Alpharius Omegon came to be (a) Primarch(s): option one, Alpharius Omegon was discovered by the Luna Wolves (commanded by Horus) completely by accident (something something assassin almost killing Horus oh shit it's the last Primarch hey where are you from new brother? Oh nowhere, that's cool, I think the Emperor has a vacation home there!). Option two, Alpharius Omegon was dropped on some dead world with ghosts and shit (oh hey look at that up there) and was eventually rescued by...someone (spoilers). Option three, Alpharius Omegon was dropped on some sort of tech-oligarchy world (oh hey again) which was subsequently destroyed by...things (spoilers). Option four, a badly wounded Alpharius Omegon fell out of his gestation pod or something and was left on Terra when all the other ones were scattered, so Emps raised him as was intended but also kept him a secret just in case.
> 
> I decided that since we're dealing with the Alpha Legion, all four of these stories contain some degree of truth, and I have therefore combined them. This was made easier by the "twins separated at birth" trope, but I think it really works considering the grimdarkness of the universe we're in.
> 
> Peep Ownership!  
WH40k and related: Games Workshop  
The writing and the named characters with whom Omegon interacts: me


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